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By Matthieu Shaer
In the summer of 1999, a few years after graduating from medical school, Deborah Kuhls moved from New York City to Maryland, where she accepted as a surgeon at the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Founded by a pioneer in emergency medicine, Shock Trauma is one of the busiest critical care centers in the country: In an average year, doctors see about 8,000 patients there, many of whom are on the brink of death.
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Kuhls saw himself capable of meeting the challenge. At 31, she was older than the typical resident (she had been a banker before becoming a doctor) and also more difficult, able to function with preternatural calm even in the most hectic circumstances. But her first months in Shock Trauma tested her resolve. The center is home to a particularly high proportion of fatal car and motorcycle accident victims in the region, and not all of them can be saved. On bad days, it may seem like there are so many patients. They were resuscitated when they were taken to the basement morgue.
At a residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, Kuhls had been taught how to handle what’s known in the trade as penetrative trauma — stabbings, impalements, gunshots. Now she underwent an education in blunt-force injuries, which are often considerably harder to diagnose: A gunshot wound is its own clear evidence, in the form of a ragged perforation, of where the surgeon must focus his or her attention. But a body battered in a car crash tends to yield fewer clues — the damage can be invisible to the untrained eye.
“If you’re going very fast, and then suddenly you’re not, the floppy parts of your body — your intestines, your kidney, your liver — will keep going,” Kuhls told me. “That’s just plain physics.” She went on: “And our brain is floating in our skull, surrounded by fluid. But what if the skull bounces around or the car roof caves in and connects with the driver’s head? It might not look like it, but that person is probably bleeding to death internally. You don’t have much time to save them.”
In Shock Trauma, Kuhls worked alongside a surgeon named Carl Soderstrom, who was a particularly committed knowledge columnist. In evaluating patients, he set out to collect data on everything from the duration and extent of their injuries to the amount of toxic substances seeping into their systems. ” It was inspiring, because it added a little more length to the paintings we were making,” Kuhls says. “Here’s a way to quantify the immense consequences of a twist of fate. That’s how we can demonstrate the consequences of a challenge that was incredibly genuine to me. It was one thing, Kuhls thought, to communicate about a twist of fate that broke a 13-year-old girl’s neck. It was another thing to be able to discover that dozens more young people were injured every day. a year in a similar twist of fate.
In 2000, Kuhls accepted a dual position as UCI Director. She is an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Medicine, and brought with her interest in data. Initially, he had to forgo the investment to conduct some of his early research, adding a low-cost car. use of seating in the local Hispanic community.
Relying on publicly available data, such as the state’s year-end traffic accident and fatality report, would only get you so far, Kuhls found. The Department of Transportation has provided some main points about each accident or what might have caused it. “I’ve gotten smart calling other people bloodless and asking them for any information they had,” Kuhls told me. Few people turned it down. Friendly staff members at Nevada’s trauma centers provided information about their injuries; Authorities sent him traffic prevention reports.
Gradually, a picture came into focus. Outside the tangle of streets that surround the Strip, many roads in the city are flat and fast and conducive to speeding, which remains a reliable predictor of the severity of injury. On slower roads, blown stop signs and red lights contributed to many of the serious wrecks, as did the proximity of pedestrians. But Kuhls could also see what was working: When the city laced a series of footbridges over Las Vegas Boulevard, pedestrian deaths subsided. The addition of a stoplight could prevent a stretch of previously uninterrupted road from becoming a drag strip.
Overall, from 2010 to 2019, the number of serious injuries and fatalities in Nevada declined and then stabilized, roughly in line with national trends. Various airbags were popular in almost all new vehicles, regardless of price, and rearview cameras, as well as lane-departure and blind-spot sensors were less expensive to produce. The improved generation meant that drivers not only had greater peripheral awareness; Most likely, they were due to injuries that could have killed the occupant of an older vehicle. “It all made sense to me — everything I was meant to paint was painted,” Kuhls recalls. “But then things stopped making sense. Everything changed dramatically. “, as if someone had flipped a switch.
In 2020, as Covid-19 rattled through the state, law enforcement and E.M.T. workers began reporting a large increase in road-related injuries, despite the lockdowns and the relative emptiness of the streets; in 2021, the state recorded 385 fatalities, a 15-year high. The following year was hardly much better, with 382 fatal crashes and a 114 percent increase in the number of cyclists killed on the road. (For public-messaging reasons, vehicular wrecks are almost never referred to by experts as “accidents,” wording that implies no culpability on the part of the participants.)
The cause was fairly simple to identify: Insights analyzed by Kuhls and his colleagues showed that drivers sped faster, on highways and on streets, and crossed intersections with alarming frequency. Conversely, seat belt use has declined, leading to thousands of injuries to unbelted drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, driving arrests have rebounded to near-historic levels.
“Drivers were frustrated,” says Kuhls, now a professor of surgery at U. N. L. V. ‘s Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine. and head of Traumatology at an affiliated public hospital. “My own theory is that the private conflicts they had were exacerbated because they had found safe haven from Covid there. So they would hit the road self-medicating with drugs or alcohol, or they would just be incredibly reckless.
In the fall of 2022, Kuhls attended the annual meeting of the Governors Organization for Highway Safety, in Louisville, Kentucky. In conversations with other researchers, he learned that the same patterns of habits he had observed in Nevada were discovered in almost every state in the country. across the country, sometimes on a record scale. From 2020 to 2021, according to estimates by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the number of injuries in the United States increased 16%, to more than six million, or about 16,500 injuries per day. The death toll was even worse: In 2021, 42,939 Americans died from car injuries, the highest death toll in about 15 years. Of those deaths, a significant proportion concerned drivers or cars without seat belts traveling well above local speed limits.
For Kuhls, it was as if all the fatal behavior that was so egregious in the early months of the pandemic was normal. “We’re all stuck,” Kohls told me. This is true at the national level. And it’s scary to understand.
Look at a year-over-year chart of fatal car accidents in the U. S. If you look at the U. S. , you’ll find two significant spikes: three, adding up to the one we’re experiencing today. The first came in the first decades of the 20th century, when cities were overrun by hordes of untrained drivers; The second good fortune came in the middle of the century, with the creation of the road formula and the arrival of new, rugged cars like the Ford Mustang. In 1966 alone, the number of road deaths reached 50,894, more than the number of U. S. infantrymen. killed in action throughout the Vietnam War.
Already in the 1950s, doctors, activists and journalists had attempted to make explicit their considerations about the increase in violence on American highways. Among them was Fletcher Woodward, a mild-mannered doctor who traveled around the country wearing a film that showed, in nauseating detail, the effects of car accidents on an unprotected human body. (“When the rate of vehicle deaths ranks alongside our top killers. . . it is indeed time to answer Cain’s question and say, ‘Yes. I am my brother’s keeper,'” Woodward warned in 1957. ) Few people paid much attention to it. It was the “golden age” of Detroit’s auto industry and the heyday of American car culture: the era of drive-ins and diners. In 1958, 79 million vehicles were registered in the United States, up from 40 million in 1950. “Popular acceptance and a hands-off attitude by governments (state, local and federal) prevailed,” he said. Michael Lemov, former head of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, later said.
The turning point came along with two blockbuster books: “Unsafe at Any Speed,” by young activist lawyer Ralph Nader, and “Safety Last,” an exposition skillfully documented by Jeffrey O’Connell and Arthur Myers, which concluded that auto industry executives, as a whole, “just don’t feel like there’s no cash in safety. “
In the summer of 1966, after weeks of hearings, Congress passed the bill known today as the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, effectively shifting the responsibility for protecting drivers onto manufacturers, who were previously allowed to decide how much — and what type of — safety equipment was included in their cars. (A related bill also mandated the creation of the National Highway Safety Bureau, the predecessor to the modern National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.)
In coming years, all vehicles made in the United States would have to adhere to stringent federal standards, governing everything from the strength of a car’s roof and doors to the integrity of its ignition and fuel systems. Seatbelt laws followed, as did the introduction of airbags. From a peak in 1972, the number of annual roadway deaths nationwide slowly declined before bottoming out in 2011, when 32,479 Americans died in car wrecks, the lowest count in more than six decades. “One of my favorite ways to start presentations is to show this video from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, with a 1959 car and a 2009 car,” says Lee Vinsel, a professor at Virginia Tech and an expert on the history of automotive regulation. “In the video, they crash the two cars into each other, head on. And the upshot is that the passenger in the new car might come out with a broken leg, but the passenger in the older car is dead. You can literally see how far we’ve come — how much things shifted.”
And yet, some victories prove more enduring than others. At least in 1966, politicians faced a challenge that could be comprehensively solved by legislation: cars were death traps because brands had little incentive to make them otherwise. Our current scenario is significantly more complex. New cars are more powerful and less likely to spontaneously explode, but they’re also taller and heavier: Pickup trucks have added an average of 1,300 pounds of curb weight since 1990, while the average full-size SUV is heavier. It now weighs about 5,000 pounds, at least a thousand pounds more than the mid-century sedan. (Angie Schmitt, a planner and transporter, called this the “trickery of the family car. “)In 1967, Chevrolet made headlines with its sleek new Corvette Stingray, which jumped 60 miles to the clock in 4. 7 seconds; in 2023, dozens of mid-range sports cars and sedans can match or beat that time, and the Tesla Model S Plaid, with its original “drag track” mode, beats it by 2. 6 seconds.
The relationship between car length and injury rates is still being studied, but early studies on the American appetite for horizon-tracking machines go in exactly the direction one expected: the larger the vehicle, the less visibility it offers and the more destruction there is. . can break. In a report released in November, the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety concluded that SUVs or pickup trucks with hood heights greater than 40 inches (popular specifications for an American truck in 2023) are 45% more likely to kill pedestrians. small cars.
Meanwhile, 43% of our 4. 2 million miles of roads are in poor or poor condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. And they are unlikely to be repaired anytime soon, given the backlog in the $786 billion structure.
Above all, though, the problem seems to be us — the American public, the American driver. “It’s not an exaggeration to say behavior on the road today is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Capt. Michael Brown, a state police district commander in Michigan, told me. “It’s not just the volume. It’s the variety. There’s impaired driving, which constituted 40 percent of our fatalities last year. There are people going twice the legal limit on surface streets. There’s road rage,” Brown went on. “There’s impatience — right before we started talking, I got an email from a woman who was driving along in traffic and saw some guy fly by her off the roadway, on the shoulder, at 80, 90 miles an hour.” Brown stressed it was rare to receive such a message: “It’s got so bad, so extremely typical,” he said, “that people aren’t going to alert us unless it’s super egregious.”
In 2020 and 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that about a quarter of all fatal crashes in the U. S. were caused by the death of the Highway Traffic Safety Administration. UU. se owed to cars traveling above the posted speed limit; A significant percentage of fatalities, whether passengers or drivers, were not wearing seat belts. According to trends documented through Kuhls in Nevada, and observed directly through Brown in Michigan, national driving rates are higher to the point that one in ten arrests are now similar to suspected drunk driving. And competitive driving, explained through AAA as “tailgating, improper lane changes, or illegal overtaking,” is to blame for 56% of fatal crashes. (Astonishingly, those statistics don’t cover the tens of thousands of other people injured, sometimes seriously, by competitive drivers, or the other 550 people shot each year after or during incidents of road violence, or the growing number of pedestrians and bicyclists intentionally targeted by angry drivers. )
Take the bad habit and add in the risks of smartphone distraction (responsible, by a conservative estimate, for about 3,500 deaths a year) and you’re done with what Emily Schweninger, senior policy adviser at the U. S. Department of Transportation, described to me. as a “true public health crisis” in terms of cancer, suicide, and core diseases.
Perhaps you have sensed the growing dangers of the American road in the frequency of wrecks you spot on your daily commute. Perhaps you have felt it in the blood-pressure-raising presence of the truck that veers across three lanes of traffic and attaches itself to your rear bumper, chortling like a lunatic bull. And perhaps you have wondered, like Deborah Kuhls, if some cosmic switch has been flipped. But if so, how was it flipped — and why?
One clue lies in a gigantic annual survey commissioned through the American Psychological Association to explore what the authors call “the mental effects of collective trauma” due to the pandemic, “global conflicts, racism and racial injustice, inflation, and climate-related disasters. “”According to the report “Stress in America,” only 34% of U. S. adults are confident in the direction the country is headed, while one-third of respondents said they feel too anxious in their lives to think about the future. . Almost a portion of them wish they had someone – anyone – who could help them manage an onslaught of stressors.
“All of those feelings have to go through somewhere,” says Ryan Martin, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on the science of anger. Most of the time, Martin says, we locate that exit in a car. “To create a situation that would cause as many people to act badly and get angry, I wouldn’t find anything better than driving,” he says. “All the details that provoke an angry reaction are there. That’s your temperament when you’re racing in the car. There’s provocation, anything you can think of, like getting cut. And as a result, there’s a way to interpret provocation based on your temperament.
Complicating matters, Martin argues, are what he calls the “unwritten rules of the road,” which tend to be subjective in nature and usually at cross-purposes with the actual statutory laws. “The other day,” Martin told me, “someone was tailgating me because I was only driving 45 in a zone marked for 40 miles per hour. That’s their decision about how fast I should be going. It’s not written down anywhere. But in their mind, they’re participating in all sorts of inflammatory labeling: I’m a fool, I’m an idiot, because I’m not adhering to their personal rules.”
Martin theorizes that drivers will adjust the magnitude of their reaction based on the offending vehicle or the appearance of the user inside. A minivan can get a pass to cut us off, “but let’s say it’s a big truck and you’re progressive. “Martin continued. You might think, ‘I bet this user is conservative. ‘You may or may not be right, but that’s what you’ll use to assess the situation. In our worst moments, we can prevent thinking of other drivers as people.
In the summer of 2022, Amanda Stephens, a senior researcher at Monash University’s Centre for Accident Research in Australia, was the lead author of a paper titled “Self-reported adjustments in competitive driving over the past five years and Covid-19. “”Most of the driving forces,” Stephens notes, “faced more hostility on the roads than they did before the pandemic. Nearly 80 percent of respondents reported an increase in “yelling, profanity, or rude gestures,” and only about 35 percent reported a backlog of incidents in which a driver attempts to cause “actual damage” to some other vehicle. This is in line with the few non-scientific studies conducted in the U. S. A 2020 survey by the U. S. insurance comparison site Zebra found that 82% of people said they were angry behind the wheel or driving competitively (five percent said they deliberately hit or crashed into another vehicle).
Investigations in the style of Stephens’s article are useful but inherently limited: few people are willing to be transparent with a stranger about their personal weaknesses, especially if the weakness in question may have caused their imprisonment or the person’s death. (Stephens pointed out to me that while respondents to his survey were content to report other drivers’ aggressiveness, a smaller portion were willing to admit their own fault. )
Perhaps the most illuminating study I’ve come across was conducted on the campus of the American University of Beirut by a team of educational researchers. Titled “Measuring Aggressive Driving Behaviors Using a Driving Simulator,” the task placed volunteers inside a contraption known as DriveSafety DS-600c: a switched Ford Focus fitted with virtual displays. The volunteers then “drive” the Focus through a series of 3 pixelated situations, using the accelerator and brake pedals, as well as the steering wheel to monitor its progress. It wasn’t until later that the volunteers were informed that each situation had been designed to provoke their anger and check their reaction to road-related stress.
The opening drill placed the motive forces on a school bus stopped on a two-lane road; To get around the bus, participants were forced to negotiate gaps in oncoming traffic, in periods “intended to cause anger and impatience in the subject, and in all likelihood incite competitive driving behavior. “Another situation concerned a left turn at a busy intersection. In the few seconds that the driver was unable to turn the corner, a car would slowly move the driver and start honking. The longer the wait, the more cars there are, the more cacophony there is. And yet, the tipping point was difficult: the windows of opportunity were short. Either you gave in to the tension of cars and behaved recklessly, or you waited. Few participants waited long. ” Frustrating occasions in the driving environment can cause the driving forces to drive competitively, even if they are not competitive by nature,” the study authors conclude.
The researchers go further: Not all reactions are the same, they note, because not all Americans are the same. The so-called “aggression trait” plays a vital role in our driving: the more tension, anxiety, worry, and anger we feel in everyday life, the more badly the wheel will act. Hence the caution shown by participants who reported experiencing low or moderate degrees of stress in their lives, and the willingness of their angry and concerned reference opponents to threaten their own safety.
Perhaps the current challenge in America is that we’re all angry and worried, and we’re all in a car, all the time. Or so it seems, at least. Outside of the few cities that are completely within walking distance or those with reliable public transportation, most communities require a car to get around. And slowly: Traffic is increasing across the country, as is our average one-way time. which recently exceeded 27 minutes, the longest in our history.
When Heather Padilla, a professor at the University of Georgia and director of the school’s Traffic Safety Evaluation and Research Group, decided to publish a pilot study on driving behavior in rural areas of her state, she found that the vast majority of respondents drove everywhere. They would go there (to work, to the grocery store) and drive fast. “Compared to other dangerous behaviors, there was a more tolerant attitude toward rushing and more reports of common involvement in those behaviors,” Padilla told me. Residents felt they were familiar with the roads and comfortable with them. “It wasn’t uncommon,” he added, “for other people to say they looked down and realized they were passing by a lot faster than they thought. “
If you’re brave enough, the clearest window into the converting mentality of the American driving force can be found online, on discussion forums like Reddit, where posters can be downloaded anonymously or, more commonly, expressed explicitly. Perhaps the most persistent theme is the story of the instigator-turned-instigator: an affable driver forced to act because of the behavior of his peers. In a Reddit post in October, a driver said he was prevented from entering traffic from another avenue. vehicle. ” I’m not proud of it,” the poster reads. I got angry. ” A cycle of retaliation ensued; At some point, the action spilled over into the problem-solving lane. “I flipped her over like she did to me,” the sign writes, noting that he nearly interrupted her. On his way out, he learned that he had “the [expletive] as well. “
Other Reddit threads are devoted to electronic distraction, a behavior that organizations like the N.H.T.S.A. have recently tried to curb with a multimillion-dollar wave of public-awareness campaigns. In 2007, Washington became the first state to ban texting while driving; as of late 2023, 49 states have adopted similar laws, and 34 states allow the police to pull over drivers for using a hand-held phone behind the wheel. Whether the legislation will prove efficacious in the long term is yet to be determined. For the time being, the trends are stubbornly ascendant: More than 32,000 Americans were killed in wrecks caused by distracted driving between 2012 and 2021, with a roughly 11 percent increase in the number of deaths from 2020 to 2021.
“You don’t even want to physically see them texting; you can tell the maximum of the time if you don’t maintain a constant speed and change from lane to lane,” one Reddit user recently observed. “To the max every time I see someone driving like that, I think: this fool is playing with his phone, and most of the time I’m right. It’s like watching a walk down the street.
While the advertiser may not have realized it, the connection is undeniably true: Studies show that distracted driving increases the risk of a twist of fate, as vodka actually does. And it turns out that the disorientation continues. Last year, a team of scientists led by David Strayer of the University of Utah asked a group of volunteers to get into a driving simulator and perform a battery of multiple responsibilities: checking the phone, turning to communicate with a passenger. his ability to concentrate on driving particularly decreased as responsibilities were completed. But for many participants, the inability to concentrate persisted for up to 30 seconds after completing a task. The studies are troubling for apparent reasons, but also less apparent: In calculating which accidents are attributable to texting while driving, the N. H. T. S. A. focuses on messages sent without delay in the vicinity of a collision. Strayer’s studies turn out to recommend that the window be widened, and that more accidents may also simply be the result of distractions. driving what existing knowledge indicates.
Under increased pressure from the government, the auto industry has implemented generation that can deter us from our phones. Several automakers, for example, have placed sensors in some of their cars, which can trip when the driver’s eyes wander off the road. Note a warning via an in-dash display, but those features are replaceable and can usually be obtained as expensive add-ons for vehicles that are already expensive.
Brian Moody, executive editor of the website Autotrader, told me he expected more manufacturers to adopt automated safety technology in the coming years, “at lower prices and across more types of vehicles.” However, he went on: “These are businesses we’re talking about, and they’re in business to make money. They don’t want to be sued, and I’m not so cynical to think they don’t care about deaths — they care. But at the risk of being crass, cost is a consideration.”
A young driver in the market for a $40,000 vehicle can find one with a suite of so-called nanny features, or one with a massive engine and asphalt-stripping torque, but probably not one with both. And young drivers, as has long been the case, tend to account for a lot of the exceedingly dangerous behavior on American roads. In 2012, 4,283 drivers ages 15 to 20 were involved in fatal crashes. In 2021, the last year for which there is data, it was 5,565. As is the case with other demographic groups, more teenagers are speeding: Of all driver age brackets, young males are the most likely to be traveling above the posted speed limit at the time of a fatal crash.
The purest expression of the phenomenon of adolescent haste is the rise of illegal street racing. “I think of it as a plant, or a weed, that wasn’t taken care of, and with the pandemic it went crazy,” says Lili Trujillo. Puckett, who founded Street Racing Kills in 2014, after Puckett turned 16. Her 12-year-old daughter was killed in a street race. Puckett now works with courts in California, Florida, and Texas on offender intervention systems. Guys, they tend to tell you the same thing,” he says. Yes, they know it’s dangerous. They know that they can be harmed and that they can harm others. But they like adrenaline, they love excitement, and they have this quality of immature spirit: they say, “This probably wouldn’t happen to me. “
It’s hard to know nationally about injuries resulting from street racing, but the governments of California, Florida, and Texas, where the phenomenon is endemic, have reported a significant increase in complaints: In 2021, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department won 1,380 calls. . of citizens in local races, up 60 percent from last year. Amanda Granit, a spokeswoman for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, told me that most of the runners arrested by county deputies were young men and men. Not everyone, he said: “We also arrested female drivers, including a mother in a minivan, for making donuts on the road. “
In September, the Department of Transportation released data in early 2023 showing that 21 states had recorded increasing rates of fatal crashes compared to the same consistent period in 2022; 29 had noticed a slight improvement. “I can’t pretend we’ve figured it all out, because that can change,” said Col. Matt Langer, leader of the Minnesota State Patrol, where the government has noted an 11% drop. in deaths year after year. But that drop, Langer says, represents several dozen other people alive today who would have died a year ago. And what made that imaginable was focusing on behaviors that kill other people. belts, disabilities, and distractions. For us, 85 percent of our law enforcement work last year focused on those four elements.
In 2022, Langer says, his officers spent more time monitoring fast roads and busy intersections and dedicated more enforcement resources to heavy-traffic days like the start of the state’s fishing season, which has been described as a “high holy day for Minnesotans.” “Anything that increases the certainty of getting caught is going to make a dramatic difference,” he told me. “If I know I’m going to die from lung cancer, I’m less likely to smoke those cigarettes. It’s the same thing here.”
Langer is not wrong about the efficacy of tighter repression. A country like France is proof of this. In 2003, the French government began installing a network of speed cameras on its roads and imposing higher fines. As a result, hit-and-run rates decreased during the first decade of implementation, as did the number of serious injuries and fatalities. And many provinces in Canada more or less revoke the license of drunk drivers, and occasionally impound the driver’s vehicle as a smart move. Years ago, my wife and I went on holiday to Australia and rented a car to get from Melbourne to Sydney. I don’t forget to drive down the mountain road, marveling at the snail speed of the cars around us. Then they drove me home, I opened my email, and discovered a $400 price ticket that had been sent to me by the car rental company. Attached was a photo of me behind the wheel, oblivious to the truth that other drivers had already internalized: the road was dotted with speed cameras.
“I think there will come a day when we’re going to have to embrace the generation more than we do today,” Langer said of the U. S. , “because the security benefits are there. “The ease in road interactions, the flow of traffic, all of this is improving, making the road safer and safer. The problem, he continued, is that many Americans “are quite opposed to this kind of generation right now. “On the left, automated law enforcement tends to be condemned for disproportionately impacting communities of color and trapping citizens in debilitating cycles of judicial debt; On the right, critics tend to chafe at any task that could be interpreted simply as an attack on a person’s civil liberties.
Deborah Kuhls told me she remembers asking about knowledge of the radars installed in Las Vegas. “I gained the backlash that Nevada passed a law banning the use of cameras in this way,” he said. Kuhls, who has lived in Nevada for decades, asserted the political nature of the decision. “A lot of people, a lot of politicians, see us as a border state, with all the freedom that implies,” he said.
As of 2023, 18 states and the District of Columbia have legalized speed cameras, and 22 states and D. C. have legalized red speed cameras. But 8 states have taken steps to ban both. In a representative example, in 2013, two drivers in St. Petersburg were the first to be killed. Louis disputed similar citations to red-light cameras, claiming that someone else was behind the wheel of his vehicle at the time of the violations. Their challenge went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court, which ruled that the citations were unconstitutional because they shifted the burden of proving the driver’s identity onto the drivers themselves. For years, nearly all of Missouri’s speed cameras and red-light radars would be disabled.
Last January, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg delivered a speech at the annual convention of U. S. mayors in Washington. The issue of auto injuries. In some ways, this factor gets a lot less attention than most of the other transportation issues we face,” Buttigieg began. “Many of you, for example, are rightly focused on fighting the scourge of gun violence. I would like to remind you that the loss of life to traffic injuries in our communities is at most the same in proportion.
Not long after his appearance at the mayors’ conference, Buttigieg announced the first recipients of the Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program, which will, over the next five years, issue more than $5 billion to cities and municipalities with documented road-safety issues. When we spoke recently at his office near the Navy Yard, Buttigieg gestured across the street at a construction site. “A good systems design has to account for people making mistakes and prevent those mistakes from being lethal,” he said. “That’s how anything from the way that guy’s tied off on that construction project to the guardrails you have in our aviation system. Of course, behavior matters,” he added, “but you need to surround the work we’re trying to do on behavior with design things that either compensate for behavior or, just as importantly, nudge that behavior in the right direction. Because sometimes being beaten over the head by an ad campaign will have less of an effect on your willingness to drive a safe speed than narrowing the lane by a foot so that it just doesn’t feel like the road itself is inviting you to hit the gas.”
Of the $5 billion earmarked for the grant program, about $1. 7 billion has already been distributed; the list of beneficiaries includes metropolitan spaces (Detroit, Queens) and small rural municipalities, such as Fayette County, Iowa, where 60% of recent road deaths and serious injuries have been related to “lane departure accidents”: trucks and cars have left the road at appalling speeds. Fayette County officials will use the grant to widen the shoulder by miles of road and load audio strips to alert drivers when they have reached the outer edge of the asphalt.
Engineering 101: The scope of the solution deserves to fit the scope of the problem. The noise strips are a critical advance for Fayette residents, but they would be inadequate for drivers in Hillsborough County, Florida, a municipality that has one of the highest annual rates. Traffic Fatality Rates of Any Major U. S. CountyU. S. Census Bureau: 67. 6 deaths per 100,000 residents. Since pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities have also surpassed the national average, a significant portion of the $21. 5 million awarded to Hillsborough will go toward creating protected sidewalks and motorcycle lanes. The rest will go to so-called “speed management”: no more red lights, no more speed bumps. If you’re in a hurry, you can explosively curse the sudden appearance of a roundabout, but almost actually slow down anyway.
Calm the traffic, choke the traffic, divert the traffic — or enact a “road diet,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Louisville has pledged to use its own $21 million in federal money to reduce the number of traffic lanes on 12 busy thoroughfares around the city and “reallocate space for refuge islands, bicycle lanes, on-street parking and transit stops,” a model that has been proved to have an ameliorative effect on fatalities in the United States and abroad.
“I remember as mayor of South Bend traveling with a delegation that was looking at good pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure around Europe,” Buttigieg told me. “And the most striking thing to me was really the story of how each city got there. If you look at pictures of, let’s say, Copenhagen in the ’70s, you realize very quickly that today’s bicycle culture there is not the result of some immutable Nordic affinity for bicycles,” he continued. “It’s the result of decisions that they made over the years. Because if you look at those older pictures, you see a place that is as unfriendly to bicycles as many American neighborhoods would be today.”
Buttigieg has reason to be confident that those decisions can be replicated here: Unlike, say, stricter gun laws, traffic protection projects are less likely to be passed through politicians and their constituents as a partisan issue.
But converting a culture takes time. In 2015, Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington supported a Vision Zero plan for road fatalities in the city through 2024, thanks in large part to increased access for pedestrians and bicyclists and the type of road regime Louisville is proposing. Six years later, in 2021, the capital recorded 40 deaths on the roads, a 14-year high. A subsequent report by Washington’s auditor found that implementation of the plan had been delayed and mismanaged, and criticized the lack of leadership and follow-up at the city level.
And even in cities considered examples of the Vision Zero model, patience may be required: New York, which has spent more than $1 billion building safer streets, recently recorded the fewest pedestrian deaths in more than a century. . But cyclist deaths have reached some of the highest levels in decades. In general, as with many types of civic improvement, things can get worse before they get better; Cities and the travelers who live in them will have to be informed to adapt to a new way of life. “The prevailing view turns out to be that when more people walk or bike, the threat of collision increases,” Buttigieg said, recalling progress in a city like Copenhagen. “But then, over time… motorists become more aware. Infrastructure and aid are built and the streets become safer. The pause. “I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think there’s some cosmic reason, like there is with gun violence, why Americans deserve to be condemned to worse outcomes than Europeans. But we will have to act.
Every year for the past decade and a half, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has published something called the Traffic Safety Culture Index — a kind of State of the Union of American roads. I had thought the 2022 edition was bleak (the headline from AAA’s news release: “Going in Reverse: Dangerous Driving Behaviors Rise”), but the 2023 report was equally grim. Of the 2,500 licensed drivers who responded to the AAA survey, 22 percent admitted to switching lanes at high speeds or tailgating, 25 percent admitted to running a red light, 40 percent admitted to holding an active phone while driving and 50 percent admitted to exceeding posted speed limits by 15 miles per hour or more — all within the last calendar month.
Worse, a significant number of respondents said they knew that other people vital to them would totally or partially disapprove of much of this behavior. They did so anyway, despite the threat of opprobrium and despite the fact that, as AAA dryly noted in a press release: “A motorist’s need for speed constantly fails to decrease times. You’d have to go a hundred miles at 80 mph. au instead of 75 mph to save just five minutes of a trip.
This last point is worth noting, not only because it makes sense, but also because it can seem temporarily irrelevant once you’re behind the wheel. Driving is like that. To paraphrase psychologist and anger expert Ryan Martin, it’s the ultimate evoker of low emotions. We would possibly be driving down the road, trapped in our own metal bubbles, but we are influenced by the population’s habit of bubbles next to our own.
“Imagine a time when someone was competitive with you,” says Amanda Stephens, a researcher at Monash. “How does that make you feel?” She continues, “Most of the time, other people forget about this and say, ‘Don’t worry, or I’m not going to stop by to get involved, but if you’re behind or have to attend a stressful meeting and someone is being rude to you you might then react with aggression or anger directed at them, or at the next driver who does something. The next driver might also react in some way, perhaps by showing concern and changing their driving. It’s contagious: the more we come into contact with it, the more likely we are to misbehave and the more likely we’ll settle for the bad habit as the prestige quo.
Not long ago, an Uber took me from my home in Atlanta to the other side of the city. The driver, a young woman, was relentlessly cutting her way through late-morning traffic; At one point, in front of a UPS truck signaling a left turn, he turned both wheels of his Kia onto the curb. When I told him that maybe I had waited until the truck ride was over, he looked at me with genuine confusion. What do you mean?'” he asked, both eyebrows arched. That was precisely how she drove. It was precisely the way everyone drove.
Illustation Stylist: Elisa Zaccanti. Set designer: Michela Natella. Prop stylist: Lorenzo Dispensa. Retouching: Antonio Rainone. Production: Stefania Biliato. Production assistant: Fjoralba Dina Murati.
Matthew Shaer is a contributing editor of the magazine, a member of the Emerson Collective at New America, and founder of the podcast studio Campside Media. Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist whose paintings have been the subject of solo exhibitions, as well as at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Pierpaolo Ferrari is an Italian photographer and, along with Cattelan, one of the founders of the magazine Toiletpaper, known for its surreal and funny images.
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